Field of the Invention
This disclosure generally relates to techniques for managing access behavior to target devices. More specifically, this disclosure relates to techniques for tracking, accessing, and applying credit and prize balance information for redemption-style games.
Related Art
Redemption games are provided in many family entertainment centers and other establishments. These games are typically arcade games of skill (such as skee-ball) that reward a player proportionally to their score in the game. Such games typically accept cash as input, and provide rewards that most often comes in the form of physical tickets (with more tickets being awarded for higher scores), which can then be redeemed at a central location for prizes.
Saving and redeeming large numbers of tickets can be unwieldy, and thus some games are configured to support credit-card style cards that track both the remaining available credits as well as the number of tickets that have been won. However, credit-card style cards do not provide users with a ubiquitous way to determine how many credits remain available nor how many tickets they have acquired. Typically such cards can be swiped at specific stations at the host location to determine this information, but such locations are limited and not useful to anyone attempting to determine their balances when they are off the premises of the establishment.
Hence, what is needed are techniques and systems for accessing and applying credit and reward balances without the above-described problems of existing techniques.